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| Photo credit: www.pofta-buna.com |
My dad eventually
saved enough money when I was in 12th grade and bought a small
refrigerator for our tiny apartment in the city. It was empty most of the time
because we did not have food to store, mom shopped daily and we ate what she
purchased, no leftovers. We would cool a watermelon in the fridge in summertime
or keep a small glass bottle of milk if we were lucky enough to have found the
liter bottles sold in the government-run dairy stores.
Like
everything else, shelves were bare as soon as the morning delivery was put on
sale and the long line of shoppers dissipated with their laden expandable jute
string shopping bags. In winter time we
had the window sill for cool storage with plenty of ice and snow.
I could have
this bacon now every day if I wanted to but I don’t have to because I believe
that I can find it any day in the grocery store and I don’t have to fight
others for it like they do in socialist Venezuela.
We trust blindly
that our local stores will always have a good stock of food every day. As a
realist, however, I know that most grocery stores have enough stock for three
days, but who wants to have negative thoughts when this country is so rich and
the shelves are a cornucopia of abundance? We have fewer and fewer farmers,
less than 3 percent, feeding 330 million. Nobody ever starves in America today
but could they in case of terrible inclement weather?
What if we
would experience another year like 1816, also known as the Year without a
Summer? Major food shortages occurred
across the Northern Hemisphere due to the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora
in the Dutch East Indies, preceded by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines.
(Oppenheimer, Clive, 2003. "Climatic,
environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption:
Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815.” Progress in Physical Geography. 27
(2): 230–259. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1191/0309133303pp379ra
Volcanic
winters are not something new, they have occurred across the millennia but
nobody was keeping track then. Evidence of inclement weather disasters and
probable food shortages can be found, among others, in studies of soil strata
and in ice core samples.
Reports in
the U.S. described a persistent “dry fog which turned reddish and dimmed the
sunlight - it could not be dispersed by wind or rainfall.” Scientists termed it a “stratospheric sulfate
aerosol veil.” It affected crops, particularly at higher elevations such as
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and even the garden state, New
Jersey. In early June snow fell in Albany, New York, and in Maine. New Jersey’s
crops were damaged by five continuous nights of frost.
Those who
push the idea of an anthropogenic global warming conveniently leave out the
historical data of the Vostok ice core samples taken by Russian, American, and
French scientists. Global warmists have now switched to climate change which
all sides agree that it does occur but it is not necessarily man-made. We should
not confuse deliberate environmental degradation and lack of conservation of natural
resources with CO2 gases emitted by humans and animals existing and breathing. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ice-core-data-help-solve/
The Little
Ice Age that lasted approximately 500 years is another important occurrence worth
mentioning that the global warmists conveniently leave out from their
narrative. It caused tremendous agricultural hardship and famine in Europe from
around the thirteen hundreds to the eighteen hundreds, affecting the Norse
settlers and even Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812 where they encountered such
an unusual bitter-cold winter and a lack of food for which they were
ill-prepared. The culprit of the severe
cold stretching over centuries was the diminished solar flare activity, a solar
minimum, not CO2.
Long winters
are not unusual in Russia or in the United States for that matter, it is the
inability to have a long enough and warm enough growing season in order to
produce sufficient food for its population.
Climatologists
who argue when this cooling period actually began, dubbed Little Ice Age by
Francois E. Matthes, are more definitive that it ended around 1850-1870. https://www.history.com/news/little-ice-age-big-consequences
In our 20th
century communist society, it was not the surprise of weather changes that we
had to worry so much about but the unwise economic and agricultural central planning
that bore no resemblance to reality or to the ability of humans to produce what
was ordered and the fact that most food was used for export in order to buy
industrial equipment needed for development. People starved, foreigners ate
well, and the communist party had its factories that produced goods that nobody
wanted to buy because they were so poorly made.
But we had
bacon thanks to my grandparents who always raised a pig for Christmas
slaughter, a beautiful animal that kept four-five families alive through
winter, spring, summer, and fall until the next year. If it was not for grandma raising this pig,
raising chickens and ducks for eggs, keeping a cow for milk, and planting a
garden, several families would have starved because there was not enough food
provided by government in groceries stores for the size of the population. Communists
do not recognize the law of supply and demand and are not particularly adept at
planning centralized economies based loosely on Marxist ideology.
